"When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them"
About this Quote
Antonioni is imagining a future where the human figure stops acting like the universe is a stage built to flatter us. “Reconciled to nature” isn’t a wellness slogan; it’s a renunciation of the old, noisy habit of forcing meaning onto everything. The provocation lands in the second clause: “when space becomes his true background.” Space here is both literal landscape and existential condition. Once you stop treating the world as décor for your drama, the drama itself changes - and so does the language you use to narrate it.
That’s pure Antonioni: the director who made emptiness speak. In L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Eclisse, and later Red Desert, characters drift through modern architecture and industrial wastelands like unresolved questions. The settings don’t merely frame alienation; they produce it. So when he says “these words and concepts will have lost their meaning,” he’s taking aim at the vocabularies we reach for when we feel cornered by modern life: romance, purpose, identity, even “alienation” itself. The subtext is slyly hostile to criticism and analysis, too - the idea that our explanatory terms are historically contingent props, not eternal truths.
He’s also pushing against postwar European modernity’s faith in progress. If the 20th century taught anything, it’s that more technology and more “development” don’t automatically yield coherence. Antonioni’s bet is that real clarity might arrive not through better concepts, but through fewer of them - a cinema, and a life, that can tolerate silence, distance, and the chilling honesty of background becoming foreground.
That’s pure Antonioni: the director who made emptiness speak. In L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Eclisse, and later Red Desert, characters drift through modern architecture and industrial wastelands like unresolved questions. The settings don’t merely frame alienation; they produce it. So when he says “these words and concepts will have lost their meaning,” he’s taking aim at the vocabularies we reach for when we feel cornered by modern life: romance, purpose, identity, even “alienation” itself. The subtext is slyly hostile to criticism and analysis, too - the idea that our explanatory terms are historically contingent props, not eternal truths.
He’s also pushing against postwar European modernity’s faith in progress. If the 20th century taught anything, it’s that more technology and more “development” don’t automatically yield coherence. Antonioni’s bet is that real clarity might arrive not through better concepts, but through fewer of them - a cinema, and a life, that can tolerate silence, distance, and the chilling honesty of background becoming foreground.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
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